Notwithstanding, however, the Prince affects an air of grandeur, and opulence—he keeps a kind of open table in his servants’ hall, where a crowd of labourers, dependants, and mendicants are daily entertained; * and it is evident his pride would receive a mortal stab, if he supposed that his guest, and that guest an Englishman, suspected the impoverished state of his circumstances.
* The kitchen, or servants’ hall of an Irish country
gentleman, is open to all whom distress may lead to its
door. Professed indolent mendicants take advantage of this
indiscriminating hospitality, enter without ceremony, seat
themselves by the fire, and seldom (indeed never) depart
with their demands unsatisfied, by the misapplied
benevolence of an old Irish custom, which in many instances
would be—“more honoured in the breach than the observance.”
Although not a man of very superior understanding, yet he evidently possesses that innate grandeur of soul, which haughtily struggles with distress, and which will neither yield to, nor make terms with misfortune; and when, in the dignity of that pride which scorns revelation of its woes, I behold him collecting all the forces of his mind, and asserting a right to a better fate, I feel my own character energize in the contemplation of his, and am almost tempted to envy him those trials which call forth the latent powers of human fortitude and human greatness.
H. M.
LETTER XXIV.
TO J. D. ESQ., M. P.
“Tous s’évanouit sous les cieux,
Chaque instant varie a nos yeux
Le tableau mouvant de la vie.”